Rick’s Rants and Raves

We went to King’s Island this weekend. Here’s what we paid, and some lessons learned.

• $47 for 4 tickets and 2 parking passes (one for Friday and one for Saturday). This dicounted rate was provided by my employer. Normally this would have cost (according to their website) $140 + $20 parking.
• 115$ for the hotel room Friday night (including taxes) at the Microtel next to The Beach.
• $30 for dinner Friday night at Larosas at KI.
• $35 for breakfast Saturday morning at Perkins on Kings Island Blvd.
• Free lunch Saturday (provided by my employer).
• $6 for locker rental in Boomerang Bay
• $40 for dinner at Wings in KI.
• $20 for souvenirs
• $15 for Gaeters Ice Cream.

So, thanks to my employer, we spent 15.5 hours at KI for just over $300, including a hotel room. It would have been longer, but Nathan felt ill Friday night so we went to the hotel room 2 hours earlier than anticipated. Fortunately, he was much better the next day.

Food:

Although La Rosas and Wings were a bit on the expensive side relative to other possibilities on the park grounds, we got a good bit of food for the money. Therefore we didn’t need any mid-meal snacks. So even if we had scrimped and saved $10, it probably would have been consumed in snacks. We also might have saved money by eating at McDonalds rather than Perkins, but I think we would have spent that savings on a morning snack or something. As it was, we didn’t feel hungry until 1:30PM, just in time to catch the free lunch.

Lessons Learned

We spent a lot of time walking to and from Boomerang Bay, which unfortunately has more limited hours than the rest of the park, making it difficult to spend “half” of the day there. When we got there at 6PM Friday, we learned they would close in just one hour. Bummer. And after I paid for the locker at 11AM Saturday, I learned I would have to clean it out by 7PM, rather than leaving our stuff in it until we left at 10PM.

Almost everything on the list of expenses above would have taken credit. The only exceptions are locker rental and souvenirs (they were the vendors pushing a card in the middle of the park). As such, I had way more cash than was really neccessary, and therefore made me uncomfortable worrying about my wallet getting stollen. Next time, no more than $50 in cash.

Radio or cell phones: a couple of times Anne and I got separated for 30 minutes or more as we tried to figure out where/when we were supposed to meet. The ideal solution here is waterproof two way radios. Had we thought to get her cell phone from the car, that would have been almost as good.

Water rides look fun, but getting soaked on a 90% humidity day just makes it worse. It is no fun walking around drenched. We ended up changing into our previous day’s clothes so that we weren’t miserable.

The old-school adult rides had much shorter lines than the kid’s rides and the new rides. The Beast and the Vortex had 30 minute lines. We walked right on the Racers. In contrast, Italian Job Stunt Track had a 75 minute wait. The kids rides in Nickelodeon universe (at least in the morning) were incredibly packed. My guess is that they probably weren’t so busy after about 4PM.

The kid pass through works pretty well. Nathan didn’t want to ride the Beast. So Anne and Emily went first. I got in line with Nathan and let people pass until Anne’s coaster came back. I climbed in, and Nathan climbed through. He then waited with Anne and Emily while I got to ride.
All in all, it was a good experience.

In my first phase of speed testing, I dealt with an unmodified NSLU2. I knew I wanted to apply the Unslung firmware, and probably make it a Turbo slug, but before I did that, I wanted to have some assurance that I would see some performance difference.

First, I installed Unslung, after I tested to be sure I could get into the RedBoot boot loader incase I bricked it.

Next, I enabled telnet, then I verified that my NSLU2 was in-fact “under-clocked.” It was. Mine read 133.7 something. Definitely not 266. Bummer. At least there was hope for some improvement.

Before I cracked the case, I decided to do a quick test of the NSLU2 with the Unslung firmware installed just to see if there was any performance change. There wasn’t. I did three runs of copying files from the laptop to the NSLU2 and the numbers were exactly the same as before.

Finally, I got the nerve to crack the case. I was rather daunted by the description of the procedure but decided to press on. Heck, it was my $80 toy. If I destroyed it, the wife glare would only last as long as my desire to buy a new one.

With a single snip of my wire cutters (albeit a nervous snip) I made my own TurboSlug. The picture on that page is an extemely good macro shot. When I destroyed the resistor, the results were little more than 2-3 grains of sand. I should have taken a picture with something next to it for scale. Anyway, I did it. I put it all back together (gently) and it powered on just fine.

I confirmed that the work had successfully created my TurboSlug.

So, by now you see where this is going. I did another set of speed testing. And the results are in–it is definitely faster than it was, but still not as fast as a PC with a shared drive. Below, tNSLU2 is the improved TurboSlug. Like my previous test, these are average bandwidth in Kilobytes per second (kilo=1024 bytes)

In every transfer test except big files going from the NSLU2 to the laptop, I saw about a 40% performance improvement in the TurboSlug. The big file from NSLU2 to laptop was only about 30% better. However, still a ways off from PC-PC communication.

Is 40% improved performance to void your warranty? You’ll have to decide that for yourself. Is the device worth $80 to serve as a very low power-consuming NAS on your home or small office network? I think so.

Additional thoughts:

One weakness with my methodology was that I didn’t use the same USB hard drive attached to both the NSLU2 and the PC. That would have been the most thorough test to completely isolate the NSLU2’s performance. I figured that since the bandwidth numbers were all much lower than the “theoretical” max of USB 2.0 (40 MB/s) that I wasn’t bumping up against a USB vs EIDE limitation.

Though I don’t mention it explicitly in the rest of the analysis, I’m sure of a couple of other possible variables:

• All networked devices were talking at 100Mb/s, not 10Mb/s. If they had been at 10Mb/s, the max I could have seen on the bandwidth tests would have been 1280 KB/s.
• The drives are definitely working at USB 2.0, not some lower bandwidth because the speed of the NSLU2 is better than USB 1.0 or USB 1.1. I plugged in a USB card reader that is only 1.1 and it was much slower than everything else on the NSLU2 and the PC.

That’s all for now.

One of my co-workers gave me a pack of stickers called “I {heart} the Office” with such nuggets as “I {heart} Win-Win” and “I {heart} marker smell” and “I {heart} an empty in-box”. So that got me thinking about what I {heart} about where I work (tongue firmly in cheek):

• I {heart} Hallway nonversations
• I {heart} stall calls
• I {heart} coffeepot friends
• I {heart} off-topic replies
• I {heart} artificial enthusiasm
• I {heart} 8 o’clock
• I {heart} …

I’m sure there will be more…

When I bought the NSLU2, I was aware of complaints on Amazon that the device was “slow.” For the most part, I thought the complainers didn’t understand the difference between a network device, a USB device, and an EIDE device. I could tell that it wasn’t as fast as a local drive, but I didn’t think it would be.

Then one day I tried to transfer some files from my PC running Ubuntu. It seemed to take forever. I decided to abort the process and go about it a different way. So that got me thinking that there really was something to the whole “Its slow” complaint. So, I tested.

Here is my network setup. The NSLU2 is connected to my WRT54G. That device is connected to a Linksys 10/100 switch. I have two PCs connected to the 10/100 switch. I also connect my laptop to that switch.

Methodology: I did two different tests three times between two devices.

• Laptop to NSLU2
• NSLU2 to Laptop
• Laptop to Desktop
• Desktop to Laptop

The two test were:

• Copy one large file (nearly 60 MB)
• Copy many smaller files (315 files, 40 folders, 1.7MB)

The laptop is running Windows XP Pro. The Desktop is running Windows XP Home. The NSLU2 is running the factory default firmware V2.3R63. I’ll probably put Unslung on it soon, but that is for another post. The Desktop has a folder shared on it to which the laptop has write access. I mapped drives to both the desktop and the NSLU2, then used a batch file to copy the files to and from and time the response.

The results between the three runs of each test were very consistent. I present here the average bandwidth in Kilobytes per second (kilo=1024 bytes):

So, on pure bandwidth hogs, the NSLU2 is less than half the speed of transfering to or from another PC. The real killer for the NSLU2 is evidently in creating the files and structures. Here it was less than 1/5th the speed of the PC. Copying all those files from the NSLU2 only had the half speed performance hit; same as with the big file.

Is this conclusive? Nah, not hardly. Does it give a pretty clear picture? Oh yeah. My full results are in the Test Results.

To Do: Make a Turbo Slug to see what kind of difference that will make. Done!
To Do: Install UnSlung Done!